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authors: Browstone, David M. ()/Franck, Irene (): - Timelines of war : a chronology of warfare from 100,000 B.C. to the present (1994) [Little, Brown and Company; Boston/New York/Toronto/London; p.562; 29cm] -> - Van Tijen Home/Amsterdam: |
Displaying time in a list, or a succession of horizontal strips, is something that can quiet easily be translated into book pages, but combing the factor of time with the factor of space is less easy. In my opinion Brownstone and Franck did not succeed, though their basic concept of displaying time horizontal in rows and representing space vertically in columns, with each column grouping a few world areas, was a good start. As not the whole world has been at war at all time, blank spaces appear where there is no event, so no text, but as the text length of historical event needed to be described vary, there is no great meaning in blank parts on a page. Also, for practical reasons, the width of the text column varies and so the meaning of space in the columns gets an unnecessary extra layer by having wider and smaller columns.
It is clear that some kind of visual statistic material with icons or simple bars could have been used in combination with text to make this half success book into something good. You may study the basic concepts of Otto Neurath and his 'isotype' system and try to imagine how his ideas could have been applied to this book.
29-11-2003 - 08-01-2004 tj.
linking theatres of war through time
War continues to be one of humankind's chief occupations and preoccupations; we celebrate the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a score of newly freed nations in a huge territory that stretches from the Danube to the Pacific, and see civil wars break out in Bosnia and Georgia, resurgent wars in Angola and Rwanda, growing insurrection in northern India, and continuing low-level wars and lew threats of war in scores of other countries. War continues to be endemic, a long, continuing worldwide plague that in our time of nuclear, chemical, and biological weaponry can very well end in destroying the human race. Yet it is also one of humankind's most enduring activities; to be chronicled, studied, dissected, and reduced to its elements so that it may be better understood and better controlled, even though the creation of a world fully at peace may be very difficult for some time to come.
Timelines of War is a chronology of the wars, revolutions, battles, leaders, and weapons that have played such an enormous role in human history, from Megiddo, the rise of Assyria, the siege of Troy, and the century-long Chinese-Hun war 2,000 years ago to the massive world wars, revolutions, and superpower conflicts that have dominated the life of our century; and from Alexander, Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Shaka, Elsenhower, and Schwarzkopf to Salamis, Cannae, Waterloo, Gettysburg, Ypres, Normandy, and Iraq. Also included are landmarks in the development and introduction of weapons, and war-related developments in science, technology, and medicine. Peace is to some extent covered, as well, in the form of a considerable number of treaties, such international organizations as the League of Nations and the United Nations, and key peace movements.
Timelines of War is organized chronologically, from the earUest to the most recent times. In early sections, entries are grouped into time periods, such as centuries and later lecades. Then, from 1700 on, the information is carried year-by-year. The work is also organized geographically, in four parallel columns lined up across each two-page spread, so that the reader can link or compare events and people across the whole world in any given period.
With this organization, all the theaters of war can be linked chronologically and geographically, as for example during the Napoleonic Wars or the two 20th-century world wars, or earlier during the Greco-Persian Wars, the Roman-Carthaginian Wars, or the Mongol conquests. Similarly, this organization provides a fascinating look at four-centuries-long European invasion and conquest of the Americas, the centuries-long European conquests of Africa and much of Asia, and the long struggle for dominance in Europe.
[pi, preface; Browstone (1994) Timelines of war]
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authors: Chalk, Frank (1937-)/Jonassohn, Kurt (): - The history and sociology of genocide : analyses and case studies (1990) [Yale University Press; New Haven, CT [etc.]; p.461; 24 cm] -> - University Library Amsterdam: H91-366 - Erasmus University Library Rotterdam: 662 G 13 - Amazon.com product information with digital facsimile of: cover, colophon, chapters, intro-pages, excerpt, index, back-cover http://www.amazon.com/... |
The problem of what should be labeled genocide or not come well to light in the introduction of the book. The authors choose for instance to exclude the victims of mass aerial bombardments in the Second World War, be they British, German or Japanese, which leaves at least one million people whose death have purposely been planned out of the 'genocidal picture'. The book has been published in 1990 and since we have been made to understand that genocide is not only something that needs to be done or instigated by states or state associated authorities. The Rwanda killings may have been led and provoked by the medium of radio, but a great part of the population have participated in the actual killing without having access to modern weapons at all. When there is a wish to kill anything goes... be it with bare hands, household or agricultural appliances or the 'ecological' way of Cambodian killing of bashing the heads of small victims against a tree by swinging them by their feet...
We tend to be focussed by the notion of 'weapons of mass destruction' and we should fear these for sure, but let us not forget that not modern machinery is the cause of all evil, but humans themselves; the 'human machinery' that build great walls and pyramids has used that manual capacity for mass killing as well.
01-12-2003 - 08-01-2004 tj.
with the intent to destroy
We have considered the utility of coining a new term and have rejected this possibility partly because we have not been able to think of an adequate alternate term and partly because the term genocide is by now so widely accepted. For the purposes of our research we have adopted the following definition: - Genocide is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator. - The terms of this definition require some comment. We start with a form of one-sided killing because we want to emphasize that there are many forms of_ mass killings and that we are proposing to deal with only one of them. We emphasize one-sided to indicate that we are dealing with cases in which there is no reciprocity; while the perpetrator intends to wipe out the victim group, the latter have no such plans. The term mass killing is meant to denote those cases in which all of the members of a group were labeled as victims, notwithstanding the fact that historically the extermination of 100 percent of a victim group is very rare. A distinction must be made here between the intent to destroy all of the members of a victim group and the empirical methods by which this may be achieved. We mean to exclude from consideration here those cases of mass killing, massacres, riots, and so forth that had a lesser aim, no matter how objectionable such cases are. The term one-sided mass killing is also essential in order to exclude from our analysis the casualties of war, whether military or civilian. When countries are at war, neither side is defenseless. Although individually the civilians may be defenseless, they are part of the group or nation that is at war. In our analysis, the group is the operable unit of analysis because we are concerned with the behavior of groups rather than individuals. Although our case materials include genocides that occurred during or after a war, these are not to be interpreted as exceptions because they do not concern the victims of combat.
[p.23-24, The conceptual framework...; Chalk (1990) The history and sociology of genocide]
genocide definition that excludes civilian victims
efinition of genocide also excludes civilian victims of aerial bombardment in belligerent states. In this we differ from Jean-Paul Sartre and Leo Kuper. Kuper writes, "I cannot accept the view that. . . the bombing, in time of war, of such civilian enemy populations as those of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hamburg, and Dresden does not constitute genocide within the terms of the (UN) convention" (Kuper 1981,1985). We base our dissenting position on the fact that in this age of total war belligerent states make all enemy-occupied territory part of the theater of operations regardless of the presence of civilians. Civilians are regarded as combatants so long as their governments control the cities in which they reside. This practice was started by the Italians and the Germans, and it "became the practice of both sides in World War II. It seems unfair to single out the Allies for their bombings without mentioning Guernica and Warsaw, Rotterdam dam and Brest, and Rouen and London. On the other hand, the rules of war clearly entittle enemy civilians living in territory occupied by the victor to certain protections, including freedom from arbitrary killing, which would seem to place the Nazi killing of Jews, Gypsies, and others in a quite different category from wartime bombings. In taking this view, we find ourselves in agreement with Telford Taylor, who has written, (Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hamburg and Dresden) were certainly not "genocides" within the meaning of the Convention, which limits genocide to "acts committed with intent to destroy . . . a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." Berlin, London and Tokyo were not bombed because their inhabitants were German, English or Japanese, but because ' they were enemy strongholds. Accordingly, the killing ceased when the ended and there was no longer any enemy.
[p24-25, The conceptual framework...; Chalk (1990) The history and sociology of genocide]
excluded victims
o the extent that a group of people has been targeted by the perpetrator, it is of crucial importance to these victims whether membership has been defined by the perpetrator as voluntary or as ascribed. Thus, individual Armenians sometimes could have saved themselves by converting to Islam, whereas the Nazis defined Jews in racial laws that left no room for individual decisions to opt out. Because our definition leaves open the nature of the victim group, it allows the inclusion of groups that were excluded from the UN Convention. Further, it allows the inclusion of groups that had not previously been considered under the UN Convention as potential victim groups (for example, the retarded, the mentally ill, and homosexuals, as in Nazi Germany, or city dwellers in Pol Pot's Cambodia) and groups that have no existence outside a perpetrator's imagination (for example, demonic witches in Western Europe and "wreckers" and "enemies of the people" in Stalin's Russia), but whose fate was no less tragic, for all that.
[p.25-26, Conceptual framework...; Chalk (1990) The history and sociology of genocide]
the authority to kill
'Genocides are always performed by a state or other authority. In the twentieth century, the perpetrator is almost always the state because authority and power are highly centralized and the modem means of communication are so efficient that such centralization can be effectively imposed. The addition of 'or other authority' was found necessary to deal with some cases in which the perpetrator was a local authority other than the state.
[p.26, Conceptual framework...; Chalk (1990) The history and sociology of genocide]
vague or ambiguous terminology
A more serious problem is raised by the moral loading attached to the term. Western liberalism, as it has developed since the Enlightenment, raises the issue of moral relativism in historical and comparative studies. Thus, we take it for granted today that we are all against genocide whenever and wherever it occurred. But this obscures our knowledge of how it was perceived by contemporaries. In some societies, it was perceived as cruel and harsh punishment, even by the standards of the day In other societies, it was fatalistically accepted as the fate of the losers and the weak. There were even societies in which it was seenóat least by the perpetratorsóas the just and justified outcome of previous actions. But since the late Middle Ages, it has increasingly been thought of as inconsistent with the values and attributes of a fully human society. This inconsistency has resulted until recently in what we have called the collective denial of the prevalence of genocidal events; that is, the ignoring of these events in historical reporting or their glossing over by the use of vague or ambiguous terminology. From the perspective of the victims, the most prevalent perception seems to have been a fatalistic acceptance that is hard to understand in the post-Holocaust era with its increasing emphasis on equality and human rights. Our current existential, or even future-oriented, Zeitgeist makes it difficult to appreciate the bullishness of values and living conditions and the acceptance of inequality throughout most of human history. Life was short, disease was rampant, and food, clothing, and shelter were almost always problematicóeven at a minimal level. In many cultures, improvements were not looked for or expected in this life, but rather in the afterlife or in another incarnation. Thus, the terrible things that happened to people were accepted as being in the nature of life in this "vale of tears."
[p.27, Conceptual framework...; Chalk (1990) The history and sociology of genocide]
have the city vanish from the very sight...
Sennacherib reached the limits of despotic willfulness when, in 689 B.C. he made up his mind to erase rebellious Babylon from the face of the earth. Having forced his way into the city, he slaughtered the inhabitants one by one, until the dead clogged the streets. Private dwellings were methodically destroyed. The towered temple of E-saglia was toppled into the Arachtu canal. Finally, water was diverted into the city, and streets, squares, and houses were drowned in the artificial flood. Even then Sennacherib's lust was not appeased. He would have the city vanish, at least symbolically, from the very sight of mankind. To this end he caused loads of Babylonian earth to be loaded on boats and carried to Tilmun, where they were scattered to the four winds.
[p.59, On cases from antiquity, quoting Ceram, 306; Chalk (1990) The history and sociology of genocide]
no report of failures
Are we to take such information at face value? In the case of Assyria most of it comes from inscriptions, many of which were so placed that they were unlikely to be read by ordinary mortals, that is, on the foundations of buildings or high up on the face of a mountain. Some archeologists have argued that such official inscriptions were meant to be personal reports of the king to Assur. Like some contemporary administrators, they reported their achievements, but not their failures and even falsified their reports by tuning failures into achievements. Perhaps the most noteworthy example of this kind of reporting comes to us from Egyptian history: it concerns the purported victory of the Egyptians under Ramses II over the Hittites. The report was widely accepted as factual until the lost capital of the Hittites was discovered in the nineteenth century, and evidence surfaced that it was really the Hittites who had won. Much later, following their last war the capital of the Hittites was not only destroyed but also burned. As a result, the clay tablets in their archives were baked and thus well preserved for posterity. These records were eventually deciphered and found to contain not only the Hittites' version of the battle, but also copies of the peace treaty signed with Egypt, Scholars now agree that the Egyptian version of the battle was probably written even before it took place because it was unthinkable that a court historian would report that Ramses should have lost a battle. In fact, following their victory, it was the Hittites who wrote the first "modem" peace treaty. This treaty considered the two warring empires as equals and even included an exchange of prisoners, an unprecedented sign of mutual respect. Indeed, the treaty was so successful that it resulted in seventy-five years of peace between the Hittites and the Egyptians.
[p.59-60, ON CASES FROM ANTIQUITY; Chalk (1990) The history and sociology of genocide]
we really need an archeology of genocide
The evidence for genocide in antiquity is circumstantial, inferential, and ambiguous, and it comes to us exclusively from the perpetrators. We believe that genocide was a relatively common event, for the following reasons:
(1) whole empires and peoples have disappeared, and it seems very unlikely that all of them could have disappeared in a short time solely through enslavement and/or assimilation; (2) the reports of extreme cruelty (judged by modem standards) and of extermination are common enough to suggest that such events were not considered to be extraordinary; (3) the religions of most societies in antiquity, as different as they were in other respects, commanded their adherents to exterminate certain groups of nonbelievers or enemies; and (4) since the nineteenth century a great many destroyed cities have been excavated without producing evidence of what happened to their populations; many of these sites are hills, or tels, representing a succession of cities built on the same site, each one built after the previous one had been destroyed. Hardly any of them seem to produce information about what happened to their population - which reinforces the thought that we really do need an archeology of genocide.
[p.64, ON CASES FROM ANTIQUITY; Chalk (1990) The history and sociology of genocide]
the success of the inquisition till today
While the very success of the Inquisition did inestimable damage to the Church, its methods of terror and persecution have been used and abused up to the present day. These methods were not only new, but also so successful that the have been copied by totalitarian regimes ever since. The main features of these methods are:
l. Making the denunciation of fellow citizens an obligation that takes precedence over ties of family and kinship; 2. Extracting confessions by imprisonment and torture; 3. Making the naming of fellow conspirators an essential part of confessions; 4. Defining the retraction of extorted confessions as a relapse and therefore a proof of guilt; and 5. In some cases, separating the proof of heresy or opposition from the execution of the penalty. The Inquisition handed over its convicted heretics to the secular arm for punishment just as, hundreds of years later, during Stalin's purges of the Communist party, party members were often deprived of their membership and then handed over to the NKVD for punishment.
[p.114-115, The Albigensian crusades and the Knights of the Temple; Chalk (1990) The history and sociology of genocide]
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author: Elliot, Gil (1931-): - Twentieth century book of the dead (1972) [Allen Lane The Penguin Press; London; p.242] -> - University Library Amsterdam: UBM: H 73-96 - Erasmus University Library Rotterdam: 427 B 20 - University of Hawaii: Rummel 'Democide' web-site (reference & comment by the expert on statistics of human violence R.J. Rummel on Gil Elliot. ) http://www.hawaii.edu/... - Air & Space Power Chronicle web-site (Article published in "Aerospace Power Journal - Fallİ 2001" quoting Elliot.) http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/... - London School of Economics: Center for the Study of Global Governance (Public Lecture by Carla Del Ponte, Prosecutor, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia given at the London School of Economics on 20 October 2003; she makes a reference to Gil Elliot's book and notes "until recently, one stood a much better chance of being tried for the murder of one person than for the massacre of thousands.") http://www.lse.ac.uk/... |
Why all the specialist in the world have not been able to write such a global overview of human violence and have left the task to a non specialist and outsider? It may be that they kept swimming in seas of conflicting facts and lacked the courage to make statements, come to conclusions on the basis of uncertainties, because there is no other way (one has to get out of the water to see the sea). At many instances in the book the author can only use sarcasm when he contrasts his attempts to make a "simple view of the whole" with the rules and etiquette of the learned world. He dares to speak, in this context, about "significance of life", "love and sex" and his own "feelings about death" ("these are not nuts for the learned squirrel" p.14).
Elliot does not limit himself to the big number game of macro violence, he contrasts it with sampled stories of individuals. constructed from a variety of sources. So we get to know in a series of almost literary sketches, personalities like 'the European soldier in the First World War', 'a Russian civilian in the Second World War', the story of a Chinese man in the total war machine, and what happens to a Polish Jew in the machine of death.
It was almost thirty years ago that I did read Elliot's book for the first time and it learned me to widen my perspective on war and other forms of human violence to shift my focus from the apparent death instruments of guns and bombs to the much greater killer effects of disruption of social structures, famine, people dying while being transported... I made me read local Dutch history in a different way, putting in focus the 22 thousand deaths in the Netherlands during the Second World war in what has been misnamed as 'de hongerwinter' (the hunger-winter) but lasted much longer, even till after 'liberation' in 1945 (as a comparison: the German bombardment of the city of Rotterdam in 1940 costs 886 lives; and the real big number of a 100 thousand Jews from the Netherlands killed, 72% of an estimated 140.000!).
Elliot uses the model of a pyramid to visualize the number of victims produced by human violence: at the small top acts of war like bombing and shelling; next executions, massacres and reprisals; next industrial extermination methods, mainly used against Jews; and at the wide base the greatest numbers, dying of immediate privation during attack and siege and at the very bottom the even greater dealdy effects of long term deprivation (p.58).
In my mind I often have associated the visual statistic system as developed by Otto Neurath, the 'isotype', with this study of Elliot, as his diagram are bare bone and some of his information may be better communicated by a system of visual mapping, allowing for multiple comparisons, something now missing with only a few graphs and digrams dispersed over the pages of a book.
Till this day Elliot's book has remained a classic example, a core book for those who want or need to come to some understanding of our violent times. He is quoted by R.J. Rummel in his studies on 'democide' (murder of population by government) aknowledging his pioneer work, but also commenting about Elliot's supposed blank spot ' "killing by Marxists governments"
(1). For quiet different reasons a retired United Sates Air Force colonel in a recent study on "Precision Air Power", uses Elliot's estimate of total deaths by aerial bombardments (1 million) to argue that precision air power "will win wars faster and with less cost in human lives".
(2) Last Elliot was quoted in octobre 2003 in a lecture by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former YugoslaviaCarla Del Ponte: "the number of man-made deaths ... is about one hundred million." Still, it has often been noted that, until recently, one stood a much better chance of being tried for the murder of one person than for the massacre of thousands.
07-11-2003 - 08-01-2004 tj.
human beings marginalized
HISTORY AND THE DEAD THE number of man-made deaths in the twentieth century is about one hundred million. Men, women and children each make up a substantial proportion of that total. A more accurate figure would depend on the particular definition of 'man-made death'. But in any reasonable meaning of the "/phrase it cannot be less than eighty million, it is unlikely to be much more than a hundred and fifty million. To set such a figure against the scale of violence in previous times involves the difficulties of comparing like periods and of allowing for population increase. However, every attempt to do so shows the twentieth century to be incomparably the more violent period.
It is possible - in my view, certain - that in a future perspective this explosion of human lives will be seen as the significant 'history' of our period. Yet the events which have accumulated to form this history - millions upon millions of individual violent deaths - are often recorded in historical footnotes or in quickly read and rather meaningless statistics. Many written histories don't even mention them, although dealing in detail with the events that led up to and followed them. A historian might record the 'cost' of a campaign in China in the 1930s (or Biafra in the 1960s) as follows: Casualties (deaths) Military = 29.638 Civilian = Unknown, possibly several million Since the only records of casualties are kept by those who incur and cause them, the likeliest source of such figures would be a military commander. However confused and inaccurate the methods of his units in counting the dead and wounded, they would produce a tidy official figure because that is what is required of them. The civilian dead would be, for him, marginal to his main interest and for them he would be content to return ; an 'unofficial estimate'. The historian knows very well that several million deaths must be a phenomenon of enormous significance. Recorded in the above form, however, they appear as a casual effect of some larger event. The impression is encouraged by the vagueness of the figure and its unofficial (unreal?) status. It certainly does not have the crisp reality of that '29.638'. The reader might even have an unconscious admiration for the humanity of these last three digits - every last man counted! - although in fact they are the product of bureaucratic necessity. And, of course, it is perfectly easy to visualize the brave soldiers falling in battle. But what exactly is a Chinese or Biafran peasant, and how can one guess at the manner of his or her death - did he die of starvation or disease? did he get in the way of the guns?
This lack of historical focus on those who get themselves killed is to be found also in the campaign and other histories of the two world wars. Many of these are remarkable for an almost total absence of human beings. They describe the struggles of the tanks, guns, battalions, supplies, barbed wire, divisions. The phrase 'hideous carnage' - compulsively used to denote the effects of battle - curiously underscores the absence of the human image by mingling its meaty flavours with the smell of cordite, the shapes of twisted metal, the messes of mud and masonry. The dead take their place, along with burnt-out tanks and empty petrol cans, among the waste material of history. The common effect of these tendencies is to perpetuate a 'cost' or' balance-sheet' view of casualties - appropriate to small military operations in areas where violent death has occurred on a vast scale. The taking of life loses its meaning, the significance of scale is deprived of any value, and human beings are marginalized in the record of human affairs. In case it is thought that war historians are especially callous, it is worth pointing to a widespread degeneracy in this respect in writings of the last fifty years. Some of the most notable pacifist works of the period are equally short on human beings. There r seems to have been a general lack of confidence in the nature of the species, an embarrassed reluctance to give it more than passing mention.
[p1-3; Elliot (1972) Twentieth century book of the dead]
understanding the moral significance of scale
What is the moral context in which we should see those killed by violence? There exists a view that one violent death has the same moral value as a thousand or a million deaths. Presumably 'moral value', in this view, is kept in jars of concentrated essence on the shelves of philosophers, or in the divine pantry. The killer cannot add to his sin by committing more than one murder. However, every victim of murder would claim, if he could, that his death had a separate moral value. Thus there is an accretion of moral significance in quantity of deaths. There is no doubt that this is difficult for the imagination to compute. After a certain stage in assimilating casualties, the rest seems an ( indigestible piling-on of horror and numbers. So long as the moral significance of scale is not understood, only the crudest relationships can be made in the discussion of macro-violence: the Nazis were wicked, Stalin was a monster, and so forth. How then are we to understand scale? As we have seen, it is absurd to look upon the hundred million or so man-made deaths of the twentieth century as the 'cost' of conflict, as though they were the casualty returns of a field commander. They are more directly comparable with the scale of death from disease and plague which was the accepted norm before this century. Indeed, man-made death has largely replaced these as a source of untimely death. This is the kind of change that Hegel meant when he said that a quantitative change, if large enough, could bring about a qualitative change. The quality of this particular change becomes clear if we connect the present total of deaths with the scale of death inherent in the weapons now possessed by the large powers. Nuclear strategists talk in terms of hundreds of millions of deaths, of the destruction of whole nations and even of the entire human race. The moral significance is inescapable. If morality refers to relations between individuals, or between the individual and society, then there can be no more fundamental moral issue than the continuing survival of individuals and societies. The scale of man-made death is the central moral as well as material fact of Our time. The 'historical necessity' of Marxist materialism as well as the individual morality of Christianity must bow to its significance.
[p.5-6; Elliot (1972) Twentieth century book of the dead]
paradox of saving and destroying human life
he ancient books of the dead were in a sense concerned with public death. For the afterlife was an extension of the public domain. It was part of the official ambience of society. Our societies are dedicated to the preservation and care of life. Official concern ceases at death, the rest is private. Public death was first recognized as a matter of civilized concern in the nineteenth century, when some health workers decided that untimely death was a question between men and society, not between men and God. Infant mortality and endemic disease became matters of social responsibility. Since then, and for that reason, millions of lives have been saved. They are not saved by accident or goodwill. Human life is daily deliberately protected from nature by accepted practices of hygiene and medical care, by the control of living conditions and the guidance of human relationships. Mortality statistics are constantly examined to see if the causes of death reveal any areas needing special attention. Because of the success of these practices, the area of public death has, in advanced societies, been taken over by man-made death - once an insignificant or 'merged' part of the spectrum, now almost the whole. When policians, in tones of grave wonder, characterize our age as one of vast effort in saving human life, and enormous vigour in destroying it, they seem to feel thjey are indicating some mysterious pardox of the human spirit. There is no paradox and no mystery. The difference is that one area of public death has been tackled and secured by the forces of reason; the other has not.
[p.7-8; Elliot (1972) Twentieth century book of the dead]
identifying twentieth century violent death
The Egyptian and Tibetan books of the dead are works of necromancy. They are concerned with questions such as the raising of the dead, the prescription of right behavior for the soul after death. They unify life and death by mystifying the distinction between them. In reading them we are offered a temporary liberation from the normal distinctions between external and inner truth. This book of the twentieth-century dead is, on the contrary, a work of necrology. Necrology simply means a naming or listing of the dead. The aim of this work, precisely, is to identify, against a background of knowable fact, the violent dead of the twentieth century in terms of the historical and moral values of a continuing world society. Part of its task is to demystify. It offers to reconcile life and death only by emphasizing the difference between them.
[p.11-12; Elliot (1972) Twentieth century book of the dead]
identities obscured by the myths of politics, race and class
The most satisfactory way of naming the dead is the inscription of their names on some commemorative surface such as a tombstone, a plaque, a brass or paper roll or even a newspaper column. The simplest memento mori is the best: seeing the name alone we can identify in the most realistic way with human death. In a country churchyard in peaceful times, I can take the names on the tombstones as a sample of the world, and a symbol of my own end. In a similar uncomplex situation, if I look at the names of the military dead, their titles tell me that they died in a special way, which I can comprehend in that same fundamental pattern of relating myself to the world. But to relate myself to the violent dead of the twentieth century ... when the numbers run into millions ... when the manner of their deaths is so full of the complex and the unknown ... when their identities, not preponderantly military, male, young but a mixture of civilian, female, male, children, military, old, young - when their identities are obscured by the myths of old, young - when their identities are obscured by the myths of politics, race, class ... How can I relate to this complexity?
[p.13; Elliot (1972) Twentieth century book of the dead]
violence is an event not a condition
Much of what is written about violence is based on theories and attitudes extraneous to violence, and I cannot think of anything more lacking and more necessary to the study of violence than a discipline based on the facts of violence. All kinds of intangible notions - such as guilt, brutality, motives, psychological disturbance - are put forward as being the 'facts' of violence, but violence is an event, not a condition. Violence is always an event, some say it is the most decisive kind of event possible. Where violence is perpetrated upon human beings, the basic computation of the event is the number of human beings damaged or killed. The numbers left by the records are seldom accurate, but when we climb into the regions of macro-violence we can at least distinguish between an order of magnitude of one million and five million, and achieve a certain perspective of scale. All the figures used in the text are orders of magnitude, not definitive or precise figures. Their sources are explained in all cases in the Statistical Appendix. The table on page 215 sets out the basic breakdown as I have calculated it, and in a sense all that follows is a further amplification of that table.
[p.15-16; Elliot (1972) Twentieth century book of the dead]
the city of the dead of the future is our city
Aerial Bombing The number of deaths may be a good deal in excess of the one million I have calculated, but it is most unlikely to be more than two million. The peak level of deaths for an individual city is about 200,000 and the main victims were Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, chief targets of Allied terror-bombing in the Second World War. The deliberate bombing of civilians was the chief source of deaths in volume, and other cities attacked in this way during the Second World War (including the Sino-Japanese war) were: Coventry and other English cities, Rotterdam and other Dutch cities; Warsaw and other Polish cities; Stalingrad and other Russian cities; Shanghai and other Chinese cities Frankfurt and other German cities, Tokyo and other Japanese cities. In the bombing of cities the technologies of violence are destroying the technologies of peace. In the early days, bombing was similar to the shelling of a city, that is the city happened to crop up the strategic plans. By the time we reach the atom bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ease of access to target and the instant nature of macro-impact mean that both the choice of city and the identity of the victim has become completely randomized, and human technology has reached a final platform , of self-destructiveness. The great cities of the dead, in numbers, remain Verdun, Leningrad and Auschwitz. But at Hiroshima and Nagasaki the 'city of the dead' is finally transformed from a metaphor into a literal reality. The city of the dead of the future is our city and the victims are - not French and German soldiers, nor Russian citizens, nor Jews - but all of us without reference to specific identity.
[p.138-139; Elliot (1972) Twentieth century book of the dead]
the emptiness of the moment of death
The human body is universal, but that does not make it a planet of flesh. The body of suffering is universal: that does not mean it is an emaciated monster. The universal body of dying is neither a stranded whale of agony nor a zombie of living death. It is true that some people have perceived, in the remains of the death camps, in the uncovered execution pits, in the corpse high battlefields, a monstrous body of death, but they have never managed to give it any meaning except in terms of negation and emptiness: the persuasive meaninglessness of the quantitative vision that created these horrors in the first place. The universal body of death is not expressible in terms of factitious quantities. It would be possible to quantify and describe the suffering, dying and dead bodies without once touching on the focal point of the death process, the moment of death. What expertise might be erected over this emptiness! What pale fluttering mortqueans* might jargon in on the subject, to explain to us what death (reduced by skeletal diagrams to physiological processes) is, to scientize and consumerize, to branch out as death counsellors advising tranquillizers and regular healthy visits to the cemetery- (...)
* mortqueans another of Elliot's new (cynical) words (pronounce mor'kwin or mort'quean) a specialist on 'public death' who will be able to explain to us why, because of our "lovely security" we do invest in "missile systems, germ warfare and big bombs", like specialist who can inform us about life insurances and mortages. But as these specialists do not exist yet, Elliot concludes: "it may well be necessary to invent them". (note tj. see also p.13-14)
[p.145-46; Elliot (1972) Twentieth century book of the dead]
the identities of the dead are finally randomized
You do not have to feel that particular emotion. The mind will tell you all you need to know, not from a train window for now the mind is in the cities of the dead and you can't see a city from the outside. Things happen so quickly in the city Dresden random incineration. It's all over says the surgeon burning boys, time heals over fast like an evening at the cinema, families bombed, blasted and burned, don't lay it on too thick he says in his white coat enjoying his tea somewhere else. Just one day and night of terror in Nagasaki, a spot in that ancient dark but it lingers, cripples the future. The city lays down its dead Babi Yar shoot and fall cover over shoot and fall cover over crawl shoot the act is done and burned but the layers remain. The city is knowledge. Each angled street comer is an abstraction or an algebra. Every traffic crossing, shop location, service point is a draft, a calculation, a geometry. The city is not uneasy with concepts and questions, it demands and devours them unsurprised. Stalingrad is mechanthropoid**, and Passchendaele***, from the generating slime of explosives the stumps of houses and trees are the same inverted puzzles as the stumps of people that sprout from Hiroshima, the new inverted people of death. The city is self-knowledge, an enclosure of self-observation. In the city of the dead all the technologies of death are seen in action, in Warsaw bombs and shells, the cycle of occupation and resistance and massacre, ghetto attrition, insurrection in the sewers. Every system and concept is used until the identities of the dead are finally randomized, so that we know as we walk about enclosed in its streets and concrete and signs and traffic and movement and cafes that the city is not someone else but ourselves. Warsaw knows that its ghettoes are emptied into Treblinka and Treblinka knows its gassed bodies are the same as the fallen of the Somme. And finally no longer needing to pretend not to know what we know we realize the same consciousness of death in the three great representative metropolises of the dead, Verdun, Leningrad and Auschwitz. Indeed we may not remember a dozen cities in any country as well as we know these twelve cities from the nation of the dead. Must this consciousness of death leave us (citadel of the mind typical of the modem city!) alone in a room where everything in the head, the angles and crossings and locations shrink to repetitive spots before the eyes, a dizziness of stopped machinery tempting us to merge swooning and mindless into concrete, grey ghosts of ourselves in the City of Death?
* Babi Yar ravine near the Ukrainian town Kiev where between 1941 and 1943 a 100.000 Jews have been massacred by the German special troops with the help of special local Urkrainian police forces. The massacres started in retaliation for a bomb attack on German head quarters in Kiev that later proved to be the work of the Soviet secret police. (note tj.)
** mechanthropoid mechantropic, a word coined by Elliot (see p.47) meaning the ascription of human traits or charasteristics to machines, like in 'theanthropic' human charestics of a god or gods (note tj.)
*** Passchendaele a ridge and small village in the landscape near Ypres in the south of Belgium, a name that hides bigger horrors than Hiroshima and Nagasaki: here a hopeless batlle raged from spring to autumn 1917 between British and German troops leaving over 300.000 soldiers dead. It was also the battle field where the German army used chemical warfare (mostard gas). often this battle is described with all kind of details of the number of canons (3000) and shells fired (over 4 million), leaving the reader to imagine the carnage of the 100.000 that paid with their lifes. (note tj.)
[p.192 -193; Elliot (1972) Twentieth century book of the dead]
science supporting the sacred ritual of terror
... Whether expressed by Whitman, Jefferson or Hollywood, the American Dream is an essential life-myth of the people. We should find another name for it, less specific to America, for it is unique as secular myth, a classic model. Secular myth in this sense is distinct from sacred myth, which is a governing myth (whether manipulated by religion or the state), self-protective and inquestionable except by iconoclasm and violent overthrow. Secular myth comes from the people and in countries apart from America is known as ' folk-myth' to keep it in its place. The fictive element in secular myth is less formalized and, although manipulable, is self-critical and subject to the intrusion of fact, hence it implies a new relationship between fact and fiction. Secular myth has two critical properties, the first being that in a society with certain freedoms and drives it is inevitable. It is an accretion of dreams, if you like a city of dreams which exists simply because there are people in the city. Thus it is existential in nature where sacred myth is or tends to become functional in essence. The second property is that, perhaps like sacred myth but in a different way, secular myth has monstrous proclivities. It grows untrammelled, it has uncontrolled appetites, it devours and consumes that which feeds it. 193 It will be conceded I think that the American Dream has these properties. Indeed America seems to keep at least a brace of her , most valiant writers in constant harassment of the monster harrying, keeping at bay, tactically wounding, trimming, stunning but never quite attempting the futile exercise of destruction. Now, religious and state power structures have in the past been based on central control of the life and death of the subject, supported by a sacred myth of the power of life-and-death. The American Dream has been conspicuously successful, as a life myth, in displacing the power of the state to control the life of the subject. But it has ignored the connection between life and death. The American Government has less control than others over the life of the subject but now finds itself with an absolute control over the death and hence indirectly over the life of its people. Only when the death-myth has been secularized, like the life-myth, shall we begin to break down the critical tensions still structuring the mystique of power. Long, long ago the mystique of power passed from religion to the state. But for a long time thereafter it was supported by the sacred myth supplied by religion. Now science has got itself into the position of supporting the state mystique with a sacred ritual of terror based on bombs, bacteria and other technologies of death. And imitated as I believe by those writers and thinkers who retreat into a spiritual City of Death which enshrines a new sacred myth, of death without life and of life fading without renewal. The Word of that myth is the logic of Total Death. And the nation of the dead is the death-myth of the people.
[p.193-194; Elliot (1972) Twentieth century book of the dead]
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author: Etheringthon, Norman (): - Blainey revisited: has peace broken out in the 20th century? (2001)[In: "Thinking peace making peace"; edited by Hindess, Barry ()/Jolly, Margaret ()Academy of Social Sciences in Australia; Canberra; p.96; ISSN 1323-7136] -> - Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA) (a PDF version can be downloaded here) http://www.assa.edu.au/... |
24-11-2003 - 08-01-2004 tj.
why does peace break out?
Thirty-one years ago, in Adelaide, I attended my first academic conference - not just my first in Australia - my first anywhere. Ken Inglis talked about the ANZAAC tradition. Geoff Blainey talked about the causes of peace. What stands out in my memory of Ken's talk are the pictures he showed of soldiers depicted on war memorials, the unsettling fragility of those stiff white marble effigies standing enigmatic guard at the crossroads of hundreds of little towns on the great Australian flatness. What I remember about Geoff's performance is the pleasure I experienced seeing a vast sweep of world history illuminated by the device of the unexpected question: Why does peace break out? It was all quite thrilling for someone newly arrived on a continent I had half-expected to be an intellectual Texas. I was young. My professors were Hugh Stretton and Trevor Wilson. I had come to a good place. What I did not see at the time were the connections between Inglisís dead soldiers and Blaineyís ingenious speculations on peace. Nor did I reflect on the links between their themes and what was going on in the world around me - American soldiers on 'R&R' in Sydney; some students jailed for defying conscription, others occupying Vice- Chancellorsí offices in the hope that they might - as one banner put it - stop the war by stopping the university. I found it normal and natural to live in a culture of war. I had been living in one all my life. Born on an army post on the eve of Pearl Harbour, dragged from school to school by a soldier father, educated at a university which trained half of LBJ's war cabinet, I had known no other world. Only in retrospect does it strike me that in the intervening years peace has broken out. In this paper I want to defend that proposition and explore some of its implications.
[p.7; Etheringthon (2001) Blainey revisite]
nobody keeps a count of the carnage
When war and war-related deaths are spread roughly on a graph across the whole century the spikes associated with the two world wars and the revolutions in Russia and China still dominate the grisly landscape. Compiled from Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditure, 1996. This pattern for the first six decades of the century is more precisely and dramatically charted in Gil Elliotës remarkable Twentieth Century Book of the Dead. These are, of course, unimaginably awful statistics.
Unfortunately, anyone who wants to consider war and peace in historical perspective must enter the statistical hecatombs. Lumping the whole twentieth century together as an undifferentiated mass of wickedness is not helpful. While the numbers of discrete conflicts (numbers of wars, if you prefer) did not decline after 1945, the numbers of people killed fell precipitately. When I accepted the unexpected invitation to talk on this subject, my idea was to look back to Blainey and the other explanators of war in the hope of finding clues to the remarkable drop in the global death toll from war after 1945. A major problem was finding reliable figures.
I had naÔvely supposed that some institute of peace or war would be keeping track of the annual carnage. I thought encyclopedia yearbooks would give me those numbers. Actually, nobody keeps a systematic count. The closest thing I could find to an organised death watch is Ruth Sivardís World Military and Social Expenditures, now in its 16th edition. The object of this publication is to argue that the human race would be better off if we exchanged guns for butter. It does not count deaths in wars for their own sake, but in order to concentrate attention on the consequences of spending money on armaments.
Decade-by-decade figures can only be arrived at by extracting them from overall figures given for particular wars. A lot of the figures are suspiciously round (2 million dead in the Biafran war and its aftermath; 1.5 million lost in Bangladesh in 1971, including 250,000 deaths by smallpox). This chancy business cannot approach exactitude, but it does give a fair indication of trends. Which brings me back to the Twentieth Century Book of the Dead, in which Gil Elliot observes that 'counting the dead is not back-breaking work but the records are patchy and you have to think yourself through a morass of slippery doubts to the feeling that a figure is reliable.' Elliot's book appeared just a year prior to the book Blainey developed from the talk I heard. ( "The causes of war"; 1973 tj.) Both publications in turn formed part of a larger research effort which peaked in the 1970s. Much of it aimed at producing a scientific or at least social-scientific account of the causes of war. Significantly, Blainey associated his work with the larger enterprise by calling his book The Causes of War. Whether this was his own choice or his publisherís, I regret the shift of emphasis away from his original arresting question about the causes of peace. As far as Blainey's own argument goes, the title did not much matter. His over-all conclusion was that the root cause of peace is simply the opposite of the cause of war. War comes when a diplomatic crisis 'cannot be solved because both sides have conflicting estimates of their bargaining power'. Peace comes when they reach agreement on their respective power.
[p.10-11; Etheringthon (2001) Blainey revisite]
The Myth of the Peaceful Savage
... even if we could reach reliable conclusions about the causes of war involving members of the European system, those might not cover the causes of other wars. Two notable exceptions spring to mind.
1. Wars not conducted by organised states. This is the subject of Lawrence Keeleyís recent book, War Before Civilization. Subtitled The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, it argues that conclusive archaeological and anthropological evidence attests to the persistence of deadly conflict in 'tribal societies' over several millennia. While Keeley explicitly rejects the idea that violence is rooted in human nature, he believes it to be more common and more deadly in its primitive versions. Taking as his example the figure of more than one hundred million deaths attributed to twentieth century organised war, he reckons: this appalling figure is twenty times smaller than the losses that might have resulted if the worldís population were still organised into bands, tribes, and chiefdoms. A typical tribal society lost about .5 per cent of its population in combat each year. Applying this casualty rate to the earthís twentieth-century populations predicts more than 2 billion (milliard tj.) war deaths since 1900.
2. State-organised violence directed internally against the stateís own people. This is the phenomenon R J Rummel terms 'Democide'. He believes that twentieth-century compilations of war and war-related deaths (such as those in Sivard's World Military and Social Expenditures) give a misleading impression. By excluding interstate wars, and adding up the deaths caused principally by totalitarian regimes, he concludes that 'nearly 170 million people probably have been murdered by governments in this century; over four-times those killed in combat in all international and domestic wars during the same years'. While there is a powerful undercurrent of Cold Warrior anti-communism in Rummel's writing, he has a point. One implication of his argument is that no campaign against tanks, missiles and bombs could have substantially lessened the death toll from state sponsored violence against internal enemies. Another is that no existing explanation of the causes of war accounts for those deaths.
[p.12; Etheringthon (2001) Blainey revisite]
the Bomb as a peacemaker
One popular view holds that for four decades the Cold War and the nuclear 'balance of terror' stayed the hands of all the old warrior states. In the right-wing version of the theory, The Bomb was the peace-maker - the Nuclear Umbrella. In the left-wing version, fear of communism caused old antagonists to abandon imperialist competition. In the pacifist version, the whole period was a lucky break in which a catastrophic accident was - probably still is - waiting to happen.
[p.15; Etheringthon (2001) Blainey revisite]
Mao & Pol Pot mass-murderes motivated by idelogy
Another remarkable feature of the post-World War II period has been the decline in deaths in Rummelís category of 'democide'. Maoís China and Pol Potís Cambodia stand out as virtually the only mass murderers motivated by ideology after 1945. Why this should be so is hard to say. Have instant communications and world opinion made democide more difficult to get away with? It is probably fair to say democide is more easily practiced when war rages on a large scale. World War II threw up a dense fog of chaos concealing much of the Holocaust from public view. Similar chaos during and immediately following World War I made it harder to see the massacre of the Turkish Armenians. And it is worth remembering that without the World Wars there might have been no Bolshevik regime in power, no Holocaust, maybe even no Maoist government in China. It might be argued with even more confidence that the Vietnam War made Pol Pot possible.
[p.16; Etheringthon (2001) Blainey revisite]
neighbours slaughtered with agricultural implements
Most other megadeaths after 1945 are associated with civil warfare fuelled by ethnic and nationalist sentiment. These make up my categories 2, 3 and 4. Taken together, they contribute about half of all war-related deaths. While they are clearly the biggest killers, their relationship to old debates on the causes of war is unclear. None of them resulted from factors said to have been responsible for European wars in previous centuries. The deaths of kings, disturbances in the 'balance of power', scapegoat diversions engineered by unpopular rulers, and arms races had nothing to do with them. In contrast to the wars of old, these conflicts are associated with weak states, not strong ones. About half the deaths attributed to them occurred in three countries - Sudan, Nigeria and Bangladesh - which rate near the bottom of any list of military powers. Armies and modern weapons played very minor roles in these contests. In Rwanda, as in Pol Pot's Cambodia, people used agricultural implements to slaughter their neighbours. It may be that they belong in a category apart from War with a capital W. Like the Taiping rebellion (said to have cost 11 million lives in 19th century China), the Irish potato famine (1 million lives), and the Bengal famine of 1877-78 (5 million lives), they are to be explained in other ways. People who wish to stop them will have to seek other means than reducing armaments and strengthening international agencies for conflict resolution.
[p.16; Etheringthon (2001) Blainey revisite]
to kill the warrior spirit
It required not one but two convulsions of world war to kill the warrior spirit and warprone structures inherited from previous ages of feudalism and absolutism. The first war swept away the most dangerous dynasts - the Romanovs, Hapsburgs, Ottomans and Hohenzollerns. It did not remove the militarist ethos embedded in the monster conscript armies and officer corps of the old regimes. For that, a second and even more deadly conflagration was required; one that brought all the horrors of the battlefield into ordinary civilian homes and neighbourhoods. General Macarthur's constitution for occupied Japan neutered another military caste. However, so long as the Cold War endured, we could not know for sure that the soul of the old European militarism had not been merely transplanted to NATOís headquarters. Now, it seems to me, there is room for cautious optimism that peace has really broken out in the worldís most dangerous bearpit.
[p.18; Etheringthon (2001) Blainey revisite]
a choir of cantors calling the names of wardead
The degree to which truly modern states have lost their taste for mass-destruction is illustrated by the recent behaviour of the United States. When bodies in bags began coming back from Somalia, President Clinton pulled out his Marines. When a monument was built to remember Vietnam, it consisted of marble slabs inscribed with the names of all the war dead. A century ago a warship was sunk in Havana Harbour and William Randolph Hearst's newspapers cried for a war to 'Remember the Maine'. A few weeks ago another US warship was nearly sunk in Aden Harbour. No one demands a war of vengeance. At the remembrance ceremony for the dead sailors President Clinton read out the names of each of man who perished. A choir of cantors would have to chant a hundred years to call the names of Americaís previous wardead. How we are to prevent hand-held rifles and farm implements from facilitating atrocities in rural killing fields of Kosovo, Cambodia or Rwanda is another, quite different, question ó one to which I can suggest no answers. But it is at least worth pointing out that the answer is unlikely to be found reading the entrails of Europeís wars.
[p.19; Etheringthon (2001) Blainey revisite]
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author: Kohn, George C. (): - Dictionary of wars (1986) [on the cover: "Who fought whom, when, where and why from 2000 BC to the present"; Facts on File; New York/Oxford; p.586] -> - University Library Amsterdam (An expended edition from 1999) : UB : Informatiecentrum: 904.70 R - Erasmus University Library Rotterdam (1986 edition) : 667 P 63 - Van Tijen Home/Amsterdam: |
As a whole the book is from 'a Western' point of view, so in many cases wars in certain world regions are only mentioned from the moment European or North American powers did get involved, but not always. A good exception is the very detailed sections on wars in what we (Europeans) tend to name the Middle East, and in Asia. Strange enough the pre-Columbian wars and conflicts in Middle and South Americas (Aztec and Inca empires) have very little treatment as if war did not exists here before the arrival of the Europeans.
Still this is a book that anyone wanting to get an understanding of the global problems of human violence need to have perused and not just once, to see beyond the singular cases as we get them presented by our daily news services. I myself have used the book for two projects, the first being an inventory of 'revolutionary moments' over the last three centuries for the project "Imaginary Museum of Revolutions" and for an inventory on aerial bombardments effecting civilians (since 1911); the project "Unbombing the World".
Of course one wishes that this data would be available in the form of a database, and even better that it would be put on-line, including interactive mapping and other fancy techniques of our era. Hopefully that day will not be far off.
21-04-2003 - 08-01-2004 tj.
the amazingly diverse conflicts of mankind
No one-volume reference work like this can possibly include every war. Space limitation preclude total comprehensiveness. Furthermore aling with a subject of so wide a range of time and territoryówars in all parts of the world from 2000 B.C. to the presentócompels a certain subjectivity in choosing what to include and what to exclude. But I have still covered the entire sweep of the globe in selecting entries, and I feel that the presentation gives the reader a clear idea of the amazingly diverse conflicts which have plagued mankind. War has a long and intriguing history and has been a prominent feature of human existence ever since the day when rival men óor womenódecided to settle their differences by use of force. In many instances, the history of a people is the history of its wars. I have defined war fairly broadly, to mean an overt, armed conflict carried on between nations or states (international war) or between parties, factions, or people in the same (civil war). There are multifarious reasons for war. International war usually arises from territorial disputes, injustice against people of one country by those of another, problems of race and prejudice, commercial and economic competition md coercion, envy of military might, or sheer upidity for conquest. Civil war generally results om rival claims for sovereign power in a state or from struggles to win political, civil, or religious liberties of some sort. An organized effort to seize power, to overthrow a government, or to escape oppression is frequently termed a rebellion, insurrection, uprising, or revolt, which, if successful, becomes known as a revolution. These kinds of conflicts, as well as conquests, invasions, sieges, massacres, raids, and key mutinies, are included in Dictionary of Wars. In addition, there are separate entries for a number of exceptionally complex and significant battles.
It is not the intention of this book to interpret conflicts; that is left to works of limited geographical and historical breadth. Of prime concern is the military information, although political, social, and cultural influences are often specified in order to gain a fuller, more understandable picture of a conflict. Emphasis is placed on gathering essential and pertinent facts into a reasonably smooth narrave. Each entry gives the name(s) of the conflict, the dates it spanned, how it began, the opposing sides involved, a concise description or summary of events, and the outcome or significance. In ddition, kings, emperors, generals, rebels, and so forth, when mentioned, are followed by their birth and death dates (or active dates).
[p.v, preface; Kohn (1986) Dictionary of wars]
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author: Moeller, Susan D. (): - Compassion fatigue : how the media sell disease , famine , war and death (1999) [Rotledge; New York; p.390; 24 cm] -> - University Amsterdam: Institute 313 (Bushuis Bibliotheek) : 313: 05.30 236 |
12-12-2003 - 08-01-2004
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author: Rummel, Rudolp Joseph (1932-): - Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (1998) [Lit Verlag; Munster/etc./London; p.544] -> - University Library Amsterdam (Will be ordered on my request in January 2004) : - University of Hawaii: Rummel 'Democide' web-site http://www.hawaii.edu/... |
`Statistics of Democide' has two purposes. First, it links all the relevant estimates, sources, and calculations for each of the case studies in Death by Government (`Demozid' - der befohlene Tod. Massenmorde im 20. Jahrhundert), and all additional cases of lesser democide for which data have been collected. The value of this is the listing of each source, its estimate, and comments qualifying the estimate. From these others can check and evaluate Rummel's totals, refine and correct them, and build on this comprehensive set of data. These data are presented and annotated for pre-20th century democide for the megamurderers and for the United States and lesser murderers. All data sources referenced in the democide tables are listed in the references. The methodological underpinnings for this collection have been given in Rummels previous work, i. e. Death by Government. Second, having finished collecting all these data and completing the major case studies Rummel finally could systematically test the assumed inverse relationship between democracy and democide. That is the substance of this book. Rummel details the tests and summarizes them. Conclusion is that the diverse tests are positive and robust, that the less liberal democracy and the more totalitarian a regime, the more likely it will commit democide. The closer to absolute power, the more a regime's disposition to murder one's subjects or foreigners multiplies. As far as this work is concerned, Rummel concludes: "it is empirically true that Power kills, absolute Power kills absolutely." R. J. Rummel is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Hawaii.
01-12-2003 - 08-01-2004 tj.
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author: Rummel, Rudolph Joseph (1932-): - Power kills : democracy as a method of nonviolence (1997) [Transaction Publishers; New Brunswick/London; p.246; 24 cm] -> - University Amsterdam: Institute 171: IM 213 - University of Hawaii (R.J. Rummel 'Democide' web-site: This is a critical review of two of Rummel's books by Ted Galen Carpenter: "Rummel makes an array of extraordinary claims, but he ultimately fails to prove his case." [" The Independent Review 2 (Winter 1998): 435-441]) http://www.mega.nu:8080/... - The Independent Institute, Oakland/USA (An institute that wants to foster independent non-biased research to go beyond the "pervasive partisan interests" of the day. This is Rummel's answer on the critique by Ted galen Carpenter) http://www.independent.org/... - UN Watch, Geneva (A speech by a Swedish Liberal Party Rummel supporter "How Democracy Prevents Civic Catastrophes By Per Ahlmark Former Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden Delivered to The European Liberal Democrats, European Parliament Krakow, 8 April 1999) http://www.unwatch.org/... |
more quotations from Rummel will come, also from his extensive website at the University of Hawaii.
08-12-2003 - 08-01-2004 tj.
an intentional revisitation of the Black Death
War has been a scourge of our species, one of the horses of the apocalypse. It has slaughtered many millions of us and left many more permanently scarred in mind and body. In my lifetime alone I have seen my own country, the Unites States, fight in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf, with lesser military actions or interventions in the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Libya, Panama, Granada, Iraq, and Bosnia. That such killing should come to an end for us all, that we should sometime conquer war, has been a dream. Peace plans and designs, universal treaties and schemes for multilateral organizations have been put forward to end war. It has been thoroughly studied and researched, its causes and conditions dissected. And solutions have been proposed. Education, cultural exchange, economic development, socialism, intenationalism, intonational sports, free trade, functional organizations, better balancing of power, artful diplomacy, deterrence, crisis management, arms control, world goverment, peace research, and so on, have their proponents. All to some extent have been tried or been achieved. Were war and other intonational violence the only source of mass deaths, it would be enough to demand our greatest effort to eradicate it, but there is also civil violence within states to add to this carnage. Bloody riots, revolutions, guerrilla war, civil war, lethal coups d'etats, terrorism, and the like, have also claimed millions of victims. And for this second human plague the solutions have been no less creative and varied. We should eliminate poverty, promote understanding, teach human values, facilitate change, decentralize goverment, emphasize minority self-determination, institutionalize conflict resolution, and on and on. 'Yet as of this writing we still have bloody conflicts in Russia, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, Somalia, Angola, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Iraq, Turkey, and a dozen or more other nations. And then we have the widespread affliction exemplified by the Holocaust and genocides perpetuated in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Burundi, but whose generality has been ignored or unknown. Mass murder and genocide, or democide in short, has been the worst scourge of all. It has killed in our century not only millions or tens of millions, but possibly hundreds of millions. It has been a revisitation of the Black Death, but now intentionally carried out by human hands. The recognition of this general butchery has been so new that general solutions apart from those for war and civil violence have only recently been proposed.
The extent of mass killing in war, internal collective violence, and democide in our lifetime and throughout history is not only depressing, but makes eliminating it seem hopeless. After all, this killing has been the stuff of history: the Mongol invasions, Thirty Years War, Napoleonic Wars, World Wars I and II; the Mongol massacres, the slaughter of the Crusades, slave deaths in the Middle Passage, the butchery of the Teiping Rebellion. In some cases all we need is a single name to provoke images of mass murder -Genghis Khan, Ivan the Terrible, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot. All one needs to do is change the names, places, and dates in Thucydides' 'The Peloponnesian War' to those of our century to make it recent history. How can one even presume, therefore, that there is a solution to war? All alleged solutions must seem only the raving of idealists. To those with an appreciation of history all that seems possible is to moderate and perhaps in some cases to avoid a particular war. And similarly for proposed solutions to civil violence and democide. "Lets be realistic", it is often said, "foreign and domestic violence are in our blood. They have always been with us; they will always be with us." Anyway, some will argue, wars are sometimes necessary when the alternatives are even more horrible, such as having one's country taken over by a foreign state or ideology. And yet it is the burden of this book to show that these "realists" are wrong. Wrong with regard to war and lesser international violence. Wrong about civil collective violence. Wrong about genocide and mass murder.
There is one solution to each and the solution in each case is the same. It is to foster democratic freedom and to democratize coercive power and force. That is, mass killing and mass murder carried out by goverment is a result of indiscriminate, irresponsible Power at the center. Or in terms of the title of this book, Power kills.
This solution has been around for centuries and in one form or another was integrated into the classical liberal view of government: the government that governs least governs best; and freedom promotes peace and welfare. But practitioners and analysts alike were soon persuaded that this was just idealistic thinking, especially because democracies themselves seemed so warlike and under the hammer blows of socialists of all kinds it increasingly seemed that the very core of such thinking, capitalism, was inherently belligerent and the mother of violence.
[p1-3, Introduction by the author; Rummel (1997) Power kills]
democracy is a method of nonviolence
What specifically has been uncovered or verified about democracy and violence? First, well-established democracies do not make war on and rarely commit lesser violence against each other. The relationship between democracy and international war has been the most thoroughly researched question and all who have investigated this have agreed - democracies do not fight among themselves. (...)
Second the more two nations are democratic, the less likely war or lesser violence between them. There is a scale of democraticness here, at one end of which are two undoubted democracies with no likelihood of war and virtually zero probability of lesser violence between them and at the other end are those nations most undemocratic (the totalitarian ones) that have the greatest chance of war and other violence among themselves. (...)
Third, the more a nation is democratic, the less severe its overall foreign violence. (...)
Fourth, in general the more democratic a nation, the less likely it will have domestic collective violence. Studies that include the relevant variables and indicators support this empirically. And those studies I have carried out specifically to test this are uniformly positive. Finally, in general the more democratic a nation, the less its democide. Although in the literature democracy has been suggested as a way of reducing genocide and mass murder, data for testing this empirically have been unavailable until recently. Indeed, so far I appear the only one to have explicitly tested this, and have found that democide is highly and inversely related to democracy. This holds up even when controls are introduced for economic development, education, national power, culture, and ethnic/racial and religious diversity. Case studies of the most extensive democides, such as that in the Soviet Union, communist China, Nazi Germany, and Cambodia support this conclusion. In sum, then, I will show that, overwhelmingly, the evidence supports this general principle: democracy is a method of nonviolence.
[p.4-6, Introduction by the author; Rummel (1997) Power kills]
a creative diversity isolates and minimizes violence
he democratic culture argument is that democracy requires the arts of conciliation and compromise, an attitude of toleration of differences, and a willingness to lose. The development of this democratic culture is what defines democracy as well established; it infuses and orients domestic and foreign relations. When democrats recognize each other as democrats, they see each other as willing to negotiate and compromise, to resolve conflicts peacefully. Where dictators and totalitarians thrive, however, rule is by coercion and force, command and decrees. This type of system not only selects a particularly aggressive and dominating personality, but puts a premium on deception, force, and especially, winning. When dictator negotiates with dictator, it becomes a struggle to see who can dominate or win.
Beneath institutions and culture, however, is still a deeper and more comprehensive explanation of the democratic peace. This is by social fields and their opposite antifields. A social field is a spontaneous society within which individuals interact. Its key is the freedom of people to pursue their own interests, to create among themselves expectations - a social order - in terms of their wants, capabilities, and wills. The primary mode of power is exchange, its political system is democratic, and this democratic government is but one of many groups and pyramids of power in the social field. Within this field there is a creative diversity of small groups, associations, societies, businesses, and the like, and thereby multiple overlapping, cross-cutting, and cross-pressuring linkages and bonds that isolate and minimize violence. Of necessity such an exchange-based order produces a culture of exchange, that is norms of negotiation, accommodation, concessions, tolerance, and a willingness to accept less than one wants. This field is not isolated to one democratic society. It envelopes all democracies; all are perceived as within the same moral and behavioral universe. The forces of a spontaneous society that thus restrain violence work as well to minimize violence between democratic governments within their social field and particularly to make war between them as unlikely as one between IBM and Apple computer.
[p.6-7, Introduction by the author; Rummel (1997) Power kills]
centralized power fosters war and violence
The opposite of such an order is the 'social antifield'. This is a society that has been turned into a hierarchical, task-oriented organization ruled by command. It divides its members into those who command and those who must obey, thus creating a schism separating all members and dividing all issues, a latent conflict front along which violence can break out. (...)
Many political regimes have created such societies and, indeed, the worst and most repressive of them even have become identified with their creators: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao. They totally restructured their societies to achieve national greatness, racial purity, or the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and eventual communism. Such was the task, the reorganization of society the tool, and the Great Leader at the pinnacle of power provided the unquestionable leadership. (...)
Those totalitarians who rule or officiate within such an antifield are not used to compromise or negotiating with underlings. Their culture is one of command, and unquestioning obedience and their modus operandi is naked power. They rule by fear. On big issues, they cannot lose, for that may mean death or imprisonment. In extreme cases, as of Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot and their henchmen, it could also mean the death of one's whole family and even friends and associates. Such a culture does not favor democratic negotiation with other regimes; it favors disinformation, subterfuge, and aggression. (...)
Basic to understanding an antifield is obviously 'Power', the dominance of indiscriminate and irresponsible power at the center. It is this Power that fosters war and lesser international violence. It is this Power that provokes internal rebellion and violent opposition. It is the Power that massacres human beings in the millions, near 61,000,000 in the case of the Soviet Union alone. In other words, this 'Power kills'.
[p.7-8 , Introduction by the author; Rummel (1997) Power kills]
some peoples may prefer an authoritarian government
he implications of this are obvious. - If democracy is a method of nonviolence, if it is a solution to war, domestic collective violence, and democide, then we should foster democratic freedom. - This does not mean that democracy should be spread by force or imposed on other nations. Nor does it mean that all people will or should accept democratic freedom regardless of their own culture and religion. There is after all the question of social justice, and while nonviolence may be a central principle, some peoples may prefer, for example, an authoritarian government and state religion like Islam to democratic freedom, even if it means more violence. However, I do not believe this should be a matter for a national elite to determine. I do not accept a governing elite's condemnation of democratic rights as a Western invention unsuitable to their culture. This is a matter for a people to decide and not their unrepresentative elite to determine for them. A plebiscite, a referendum, or a democratic election should be the basis for deciding whether a people will be governed democratically.
[p.9, Introduction by the author; Rummel (1997) Power kills]
holy wars on dissimilar systems
Many social scientists looked upon any statements of the value of democracy, particularly that democracies were more peaceful, as right-wing, anti-communist propaganda. To espouse freedom appeared a flag waved by cold warriors. Moreover, there was the fear that emphasizing the peacefulness of democracies (or some other democratic virtue) could be an excuse for violence against nondemocratic regimes and would heighten the possibility of war between the United State and Soviet Union. (...)
Jack Vincent put this fear even more directly:
This finding, if valid, has important foreign policy implications. It might suggest, for example, that American covert and overt interventions for the purpose of democratizing a society would help promote peace in the world system. On the other hand, if Rummel's finding is suspect, supporters of such interventions would have to look elsewhere for possible justification. This caution may be of particular importance in an epoch characterized by an increasing tendency to declare "holy wars" on dissimilar systems. That is, some, not necessarily Rummel, might ironically (given Rummel's basic hypothesis) see his findings as a good basis for aggressive interventions against nondemocratic or non-American type systems. If nondemocratic systems are the major cause of conflict in the world, why not exert every effort to democratize the world, even if a temporary period of forceful change is required? His findings, then, might have the curious effect of justifying possible temporary violence to eliminate nonfreedom in the world by "free states," possible temporary violence to eliminate nonfreedom in the i.e., by the very states which should be least violent according to the theory. (*)
As a consequence of the perceived ideological nature of the findngs, the fear that their propagation might encourage war rather than discourage it, and also perhaps because they were stated too boldly for ie social scientific culture of the time,38 these results on democracies ot making violence on each other tended at first to be disregarded by many social scientists. Indeed, it was not until the Soviet Union was breaking up and, thus, he likelihood of a Soviet-American nuclear war was disappearing completely, that a new confirmation was published.
* Vincent, Jack. "Freedom and international conflict: Another look." International Studies Quarterly 31 (1987): 103-12.
[p.31-32; Rummel (1997) Power kills]
43 million death by Stalin
This is a new Proposition. It asserts that the more democracy the less democide (genocide and mass murder by a regime). It is a counterpart to the intemal violence Proposition that focuses on collective violenceóthat between a political regime and some opposing group. Both sides have arms and people are killed in armed combat or clashes. For democide, however, the killing is wholly one-sided. Only the regime is armed andAose it'kills arem its control or otherwise helpless.
As everyone knows, Nazi Germany murdered near some 6,000,000 Jews. That was genocide, a type of democide. What is much less known is that this regime also killed millions of non-Jewish Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians, and tens or hundreds of thousands of others, such „s Yugoslavs, Balts, Czechs, and Frenchmen. In total Nazi Germany murdered around 21,000,000 people. (1) But this incredible toll is overshadowed by the genocide and mass murder (democide) of the Soviel Union, which from 1917 to 1987 murdered some 61,000,000 people, near 55,000,000 of them its own citizens (among the foreigners killed were Romanians, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Poles, Germans, Czechs, Koreans, Japanese, and others that feil under Soviet ruie). Stalin alone is responsible for almost 43,000,000 of these deaths. (2) Even those killed by Communist China, especially under Mao Tsetung, slightly over 35,000,000, exceed the Nazi toll. (3)
But then there are the lesser murderers, such „s Nationalist China under Chiang Kai-shek (about 10,000,000 killed), Japan in Worid War II (almost 6,000,000), and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge (some 2,000,000). Indeed, for our Century there are also about a dozen other regimes that have murdered in the millions. Some of these are wellkknown for their killing; some have been forgotten; some never did reach public consciousness.
1 Rummel/1992 Democide 2 Rummel/1990 Lethal politics 3 Rummel/1991 China's bloody century
[p.91-92; Rummel (1997) Power kills]
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author: Shapiro, Michael J. (): - Violent cartographies : mapping cultures of war (1997) [University of Minnesota Press; Minneapolis , Minn; p.241; 21 cm] -> - University Library Amsterdam: UBM: H 01-318 - Henciclopedia: a site that links Uruquayan culture to cyberspace (Article by Patrick Ibert, a Canadian social scientists starting with a quote by Shapiro on 'state, nation and maps'... and concluding in this way: "The consciousness that the equation between nation and state is the basic principle of the modern state and of its capacity to generate both genocides and oblivion leads nowadays to a renewed critical understanding of relations of domination and of locatedness, and its correlated terms: position, mapping, liminal space, spaces of contention, centre/margin, global/local.") http://www.henciclopedia.org.uy/... - Syracuse Univerfsity: Maxwell School of Citizenshp and Public Affairs (Seminar by Shapiro in 1983 at the American University School of International Service on "Language and Political Understanding; a look in the linguistic mirror" 3 excerpts of approximate 10 minutes each from that seminar in RealAudio [you need to have this free software installed; sound quality of the (historical) recording is not always optimal tj.] ) http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/... - Amazon.com product information with digital facsimile of: cover, colophon, chapters, intro-pages, excerpt, index, back-cover http://www.amazon.com/... |
How can we resist a nation-state vision of the globe? What is needed to "unmap" the familiar world? In Violent Cartographies, Michael J. Shapiro considers these questions, exploring the significance of war in contemporary society and its connections to the geographical imaginary.
Employing an ethnographic perspective, Shapiro uses whiplash reversals and bizarre juxtapositions to jolt readers out of conventional thinking about international relations and security studies. Considering the ideas of thinkers ranging from von Clausewitz to Virilio, from Derrida to DeLillo, Shapiro distances readers from familiar political and strategic accounts of war and its causes.
Shapiro uses literary and film analyses to elucidate his themes. For example, he considers such cultural artifacts as U.S. Marine recruiting television commercials, American war movies, and General Schwarzkopf's autobiography, elaborating how a certain image of American masculinity is played out in the military imaginary and in the media. Other topics are Melville's The Confidence Man, BuÒuel's film That Obscure Object of Desire, and a comparison of the U.S. invasion of Grenada to an Aztec "flower war." Throughout, Shapiro draws attention to the violence of the colonial encounters through which many modern nation-states were formed, and ultimately suggests possible directions for an ethics of minimal violence in the encounter with others.
The overall effect is of a complex, cumulative, and layered analysis of the historical and moral conditions of the current use of violence in the conduct of international relations. A fascinating and challenging work, Violent Cartographies will interest anyone concerned with the connections between war and culture.
[Summary of the book by the publisher]
27-11-2003 - 08-01-2004 tj.
the state configuration is not the only spatial reality
For example, for those preoccupied with the geopolitical strategies ofİviolence, the current system of global jurisdictions, represented by theİboundaries of nation-states, constitutes an unproblematic grammar ofİpolicy action; it is the basis for educing the "explanatory variables" inİtheir studies of either the onset or the prolongation of war.İ Exemplary of this preoccupation is a contemporary analysis of theİimportance of geography for understanding war. The analysts concernİthemselves with the "mapping" of "spatial and geopolitical contextsİwithin which decision makers must calculate and make choices." (1) Butİdespite showing a sensitivity to a subjective dimension of this mapping,İrecognizing that it has shifting meanings for "decision makers," theyİtreat the state configuration as the only spatial reality, failing to recognize that,İas Etienne Balibar has put it, the real - for example, the nationstate structure asİa whole - is also an imaginary; it is one wayİamongİothers of organizing the significance of space. (2) And most significantly,İspace for such "security"-concerned analysts provides a perceived context for explainingİdecision making related to violence; theyİproduce aİworld whose focal points are the power centers of states.
1 Randolph M. Siverson and Harvey Starr, The Diffusion of War: A Study of Opportunity and Willingness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), p. 31.
2 See Etienne Balibar, "The Nation Form: History and Ideology," trans. Chris Turner, in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 86-106.
[px-xi, preface; Shapiro (1997) Violent cartographies]
media and academia are anchored in the state
The omission of native peoples from the discourse on war is evidentİin a recent mapping of contemporary armed struggles. Bernard Nietschmann demonstratesİthat although in recent years there has been relatively little warfare between sovereignİstates, there continueİto be enormous casualties and forced dislocations in the struggles between statesİand various indigenous nations (as well as between states and statelessİpeoples). Identifying 120 "wars" in 1987, Nietschmann found only 4 thatİinvolved conflict between two sovereign states, while 100 of the warsİwere accounted for by struggles in which states were at war with insurgencies and indigenous nations. (95) These struggles have received little attention,İfor "media and academia are anchored in the state. Their tendency is to considerİstruggles against the state to be illegitimateİorİinvisible.... They are hidden from view because the fighting is againstİpeoples and countries that are often not even on the map." (96)
Nietschmann's mapping practice is extraordinary because the dominant war cartography has opposed state to state. This dominance in representation is matched by a characteristic of narratives of warfare, "histories" that represent only interstate antagonisms. At the same time that European states were subjugating the peoples in the peripheral trade zones during the seventeenth century, their rulers "managed to shift the balance decisively against both individual citizens and rival power holders within their own states." (97) This led, as Charles Tilly has noted, to the disarmament of the civilian population while the states "own armed force began to overshadow the weaponry available to any of its domestic rivals." (98)
95-96 Bernard Nietschmann, "The Third World War," Cultural Survival Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1987):1-16.
97-98 Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990), p. 69.
[p.29, chapter: Violence in the American Imaginaries; Shapiro (1997) Violent cartographies]
the violence of imperialism is in the control over stories
In order to oppose war and promote peace, Levinas enacted a linguistic war on theİgoverning assumptions of Western philosophy. He arguedİthat philosophy from Plato through Heidegger constructed persons andİpeoples within totalizing conceptions of humanity. The ethical regard,İhe insisted, is one that resists encompassing 'the Other' as part of theİthat resists recognizing the Other solely within the already spokenİcodes of a universalizing vision of humankind. However problematicİLevinas's notion of infinite respect for an alterity that always evadesİcomplete comprehension may be (an issue I discuss later), it nevertheless makes possibleİa concern with the violence of representation,İwithİdiscursive control over narratives of space and identity, which is centralİto my analysis. Edward Said emphasized the ethicopolitical significanceİof systems of discursive control, locating the violence of imperialism inİthe control over stories: "The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from formingİand emerging, is very important to cultureİand imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them." (9)İ
Indeed, contemporary neoimperialism resides in part in the dominance of a spatialİstory that inhibits the recognition of alternatives. Aİgeopolitical imaginary, the map of nation-states, dominates ethical discourse atİa global level. Despite an increasing instability in the geopolitical map of states,İthe more general discourses of "internationalİaffairs" and "international relations" continue to dominate both ethicalİand political problematics. Accordingly, analyses of global violence areİmost often constructed within a statecentric, geostrategic cartography,İwhich organizes the interpretation of enmities on the basis of an individual andİcollective national subject and on cross-boundaryİantagonisms. And ethical theories aimed at a normative inhibition of theseİantagonisms continue to presume this same geopolitical cartography. (10)İTo resist this discursive/representational monopoly, we must challenge the geopoliticalİmap. Although the interpretation of mapsİis usually subsumed within a scientific imagination, it is nevertheless the caseİthat "the cartographer's categories," as J. B. Harley has put it, "are theİbasis of the morality ofthe map" (11) "Morality" here emerges most significantly fromİthe boundary and naming practices that construct theİmap.İThe nominations and territorialities that maps endorse constitute,İamong other things, a "topographical amnesia." (12) Effacements of olderİmaps in contemporary namings and configurations amount to a nonrecognition of older, oftenİviolently displaced practicesİof identity andİspace. Among the consequences of this neglected dimension of cartography, which includeİa morality-delegating spatial unconsciousİand aİhistorical amnesia with respect to alternatives, has been a radical circumspectionİof the kinds of persons and groups recognized as worthyİsubjects of moral solicitude. State citizenship has tended to remain theİprimary basis for the identities recognized in discourses such as theİethics ofi nternational affairs."
9 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. xiii.
10 For a significant challenge to the "ethics of international affairs" tradition, see the recent work of David Campbell: Sovereignty, Ethics, and Narratives of the Gulf War (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1993) and "The Deterritorialization of Responsibility: Levinas, Derrida, and Ethics after the End of Philosophy," Alternatives 19, no. 4 (December 1994)
11 J. B. Harley, "Cartographic Ethics and Social Theory," Cartographica 27, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 1-23.
12 The expression belongs to Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), chapter 1.
[p.175-176, chapter: The Ethics of Encounter; Shapiro (1997) Violent cartographies]
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authors: Small, Melvin (1939-)/Singer, J. David (1925-): - Resort to arms : international and civil wars , 1816-1980 (1982) [Sage; beverly Hills; p.372; 23 cm] -> - University Amsterdam: Institute 189: IM 119 |
introduction not finished yet....
12-12-2003 - 08-01-2004 tj.
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author: Wright, Quincy (1890-1970): - A study of war (1942/1965) [2nd ed. with a commentary on war since 1942; University of Chicago Press; Chicago; p.1637; 24 cm] -> - University Library Amsterdam: UBM: 1327 B 34 - University Amsterdam: Institute 138: GES 45.B.3775 |
more quotes need to be scanned yet...
12-12-2003 - 08-01-2004 tj.
not for everybody war is a problem
To different people war may have very different meanings. To some it is a plague which ought to be eliminated; to some, a mistake which should be avoided; to others, a crime which ought to be punished; and, to still others, it is an anachronism which no longer serves any purpose. On the other hand some who take a more receptive attitude toward war and regaraed it n as an adventure which may be interesting, an instrument which may be usefui, a procedure which may be legitimate and appropriate, or a condition of existence for which one must be prepared. To people of the latter type war is not a problem. They take it for granted, whether with eagemess, complacency, or concem. Its details may prove unexpected or disagreeable, but they are not interpreted „s presenting a problem of war-in-general. They can be satis:torily handled by the professional historian, diplomat, intemational lawyer, or strategist. To tbe first group, however, war-in-general is a problem, and it is to that group that this study is especially addressed. It is believed that this group has increased during the past Century, and especially in the last twenty-five years, until it constitutes a majority of the human race, although in some countries and regions it may be in the minority.
This growth of the opinion that war is a problem may be attributed to four types of change: (o) the shrinking of the world, (6) the acceleration of history, (c) the progress of military invention, and (d) the rise of democracy.
[p.3, of the Chapter I, Objectives of tghe study; Wright (1942/1965) A study of war]
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author: Arnold, Guy (): - Wars in the Third World since 1945 (1991/1995) [second edition; Cassell; New York; p.670; 25cm] -> - University Amsterdam: Institute 171: IM 173 2e ed. |
17-12-2003 - 08-01-2004
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editors: Segal, Rafi (1967-)/Weizman, Eyal (1970-): - A civil occupation : the politics of Israeli architecture (2002) [} -> - Van Tijen Home/Amsterdam (only in digital facsimile form) : - Verso Books, London (The big size folded A2 publication has also been reformatted to fit a standard book... if the maps will be still readable at booksize I have not yet been able to verify...) http://www.versobooks.com/... - Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Netherlands, Rotterdam (The center has an exhibtion on "A Civil occupation..." from november 14th 2003 to january 4 2004. They have a made a page with valuable links to the subject.) http://www.wdw.nl/... - World Socialist Web Site (This international trotkyst organisation, happens to have a good summary of the debate around this publication and the way in which censorship was exercised...) http://www.wsws.org/... |